DDoS and Security Reports

A few things that popped up on my reading radar this morning.

• An interesting talk from last week by Jaak Aaviksoo, the Minister of Defense of the Republic of Estonia, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has been posted online. Entitled Cyberspace: A New Security Dimension at Our Fingertips, the speaker reviews the DDoS attacks earlier this year against Estonia. Audio and transcripts of the 1 hour talk are also available.
• The useful Upcoming service, now owned by Yahoo!, suffered a spam attack it seems. I noticed this in my RSS feeds this morning, but I don’t know how widespread it is. On upcoming Ann Arbor events you an see things like Freeware – free poker online at the Michigan Union Ballroom. I sure hope they close whatever spam hole opened up …
• Mum defends suspected Kiwi botmaster, from The Register. The guy who was arrested is Owen Walker, and it’s his mom who has gone to the press defending him. I doubt anyone’s mom knows they’re an online criminal, so her defense isn’t terribly surprising. Owen was picked up in Operation Bot Roast II recently.
• DARPA seeks network firing ranges for cyber weaponry, also from The Register. Basically the US DARPA team wants to look at emulated networks of varying sizes to test likely real world effects of attacks and tactics.
• Gary McGraw on Exploiting Online Games, from InformIT. I’m not a gamer, but I love the hacks that these guys do. They really crack me up.
• Inside the “Ron Paul” Spam Botnet, from our friends at SecureWorks. Always great writing and research, this time Joe Stewart looks at spammers, malware, and US politics.
• These next two papers are academic papers from my friend Thorsten. Basically, especially as China is likely to become a major source and target of online malware and crime, it makes sense to study the scenario. The first paper is Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web, a combination of German and Chinese research.
• The second paper is Characterizing the IRC-based Botnet Phenomenon, by the same team. The findings are not too surprising, but a good view nonetheless. Here’s a quick summary from heise Security.
• Finally a backgrounder on botnets: Botnets – The Silent Threat, published by ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency). I was a reviewer of the paper and it was recently delivered at a European workshop.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Interesting Research, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.